Dynamic Verification and Control of Mobile Peer-to-Peer Systems

The development of dependable mobile P2P systems is an inherently challenging task since such systems may operate in largely uncontrolled environments and may engage new peers or lose existing ones without any form of centralised control. In these circumstances, dependability and security can be enhanced through the runtime monitoring (a.k.a. dynamic verification) of the compliance of the system behaviour against specific dependability and security properties and the execution of control in cases where properties are violated. In this paper we present a framework for the dynamic verification and control of mobile P2P systems, which uses peer-specific monitoring policies to specify application-level properties. The deployment of this framework for monitoring system behaviour adds an extra layer of security and dependability checking, which is independent from checks performed directly by the P2P system that is being monitored. Thus, it makes the system more fault-tolerant and enables event logging that could be used for further analysis and prevention of attacks.